Give Eliza equivalent compute time and functionality to interpret the data type and it probably could get something approaching a result.
Sorry, but this is simply incorrect. Do you know what Eliza is and how it works? It is categorically different from LLMs.
That’s not something that is seriously debated academically
This is also incorrect. I think the issue that many people have is that they hear "AI" and think "superintelligence". What we have right now is indeed AI. It's a primitive AI and certainly no superintelligence, but it's AI nonetheless.
There is no known reason to think that the approach we're taking now won't eventually lead to superintelligence with better hardware. Maybe we will hit some limit that makes the hype die down, but there's no reason to think that limit exists right now. Keep in mind that although this is apples vs oranges, GPT-4 is a fraction of the size of a human brain. Let's see what happens when hardware advances give us a few more orders of magnitude. There's already a huge, noticeable difference between GPT 3.5 and GPT 4.